During the manufacture of electrical connectors, integrated circuits and other electrical or electronic devices, the devices are stored in and transferred to and from various types of equipment for carrying out different manufacturing or assembling steps. For instance, the devices may be assembled, tested, inspected, and the like, during which the devices are stored, protected and handled in protective storage tubes between various manufacturing processes or machines. Most such tubes are fabricated of extruded plastic material, but the tubes may be made of metal or other appropriate material. A "rack" of the tubes may be loaded into a "magazine" of an assembly machine, with the devices being dispensed seriatim from each individual tube, whereafter the tube is discarded for dispensing devices from the successive tube in the rack.
As an example, only, such storage tubes may hold as many as twenty-five or more electrical devices for handling during manufacture. When processing is complete, the devices also may be shipped to customers in the tubes. A very large electronic manufacturer may process thousands and thousands of electronic devices in any given lot. For every one-thousand electronic devices, forty storage tubes are used. A plurality of the tubes normally are stored in a bulk container or tote box which is transferred, along with the related paperwork, between separate manufacturing processes or to the customer.
Heretofore, after the electronic devices have been completely processed or finally used by a customer, the storage tubes have been discarded as disposable items. However, with ever-increasing manufacturing volume, and with ever-increasing environmental considerations, it has become expedient to reuse or recycle such storage tubes.
A variety of different systems have been used in the prior art for holding the electronic devices within the individual storage tubes. Some systems employ tape, pins or plugs placed about, through or inserted into opposite ends of the tubes. These systems are acceptable, but they are very labor intensive to apply and remove the tape, pins or plugs, and they are not efficient for loading and feeding in a component feeding apparatus.
One packaging system has utilized a pair of elongated stop rods for holding the electronic devices in their respective tubes, and to hold a plurality of the tubes for conjoint manual manipulation. More particularly, each tube is provided with an aperture therethrough near each opposite end thereof. When a "rack" of tubes are assembled with a plurality of tubes in a generally parallel juxtaposition, the stop rods are inserted through the aligned apertures of all of the tubes in the rack to close off the ends of the tubes and to allow for manual handling of an entire rack of tubes interconnected by the rods. An improved system that employs such stop rods is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,279,415 to Edgley et al, dated Jan. 18, 1994, and assigned the assignee of the present invention.
Although the stop rod system, described above, has proven quite effective in many applications, certain disadvantages are encountered in some applications, particularly with very miniaturized electronic devices. In particular, the holes or slots may expand after considerable reuse or recycling. Burs may be caused during punching the holes or slots in the tube, and the burs may interfere with sliding movement of the electronic devices within the tube, such as in a component feeding apparatus. The holes or slots are expensive to punch, because of the need for a secondary (punching) operation. The holes or slots cannot be punched in small tubes, because of the tooling required to back up the punch will not fit within small tubes.
The present invention is directed to solving the above problems in a packaging system which does not require holes or slots to be punched in the tubes and does not require tape, pins or plugs to be placed about, through or inserted into the individual tubes.